Page:The Land Question.djvu/19

19 the estates of their betters. I trust that this was not Lord Rosebery's own ideal, for it is difficult to say whether it is worst politically, socially, or agriculturally. It appears to me to concentrate in it nearly everything that is most in conflict with what we ought to desire; and if this is to be the creed of official Liberalism on the land-question, I for one would rather join hands with Mr. George and sweep all landlords into the workhouse, than act with men who would reduce rural England to an appanage of the Rothschilds. The migration of the agricultural labourer into the towns has gone too far already. The reason of it has been the miserable life which the labourer has led, and the absence of any means of bettering his position in the country. The farmer, paying the landlord the rent he has been compelled to pay, could not give the labourer more than the scantiest wages; and when, owing to the increasing scarcity of labourers through migration into towns, the rates of wages rose, then the farmer, not having the means of meeting this expense, began to employ a smaller number and to turn off hands, keeping perhaps two men on the farm where before he had kept three. The agricultural collapse of the last ten years has certainly been increased by the insufficient employment of labour. Every one who knows farms intimately is aware that this is the case. Hay crops have been lost and corn crops have been lost because, when there was an interval of fine weather, there were not hands enough to get the harvest in. Sowing has been interrupted by winter, and fields have got into the most dreadful condition, or gone out of cultivation altogether, because the work was more than the hands could do; and as for making up for bad harvests by any of the minute and more lucrative forms of husbandry, that of course was out of the question, when the roughest work could not be adequately performed. Then another result of immigration from the country to the town has been to lower the average type and character of the labourer himself. The best men, especially in the south of England, have gone away. Those who have remained have been been in too many cases the weak, the apathetic, and the hopeless. In many villages the labourers are all old men; and the complaint so often made has probably a great deal of truth in it, that you cannot get the work out of the labourer that you could twenty years ago. Well,